Clay Shirky at the Berkman Center, small-group talk. I missed this the first time around. It’s excellent. Shirky gets in deep on what his book means for political protest, among other things, and he expresses the worst-case scenario for newspaper death perfectly. Fascinating.

IT Conversations: Jon Udell’s “Interviews with Innovators” interviews, um, me. I put this last because I’m not that proud of it. Udell is interesting to talk to, and we ended up talking for almost two hours (the second half was mostly edited out), but I think we got off to a bumpy start with recommendations and ThingISBN. Excited as I was to go past the usual surface discussion, I ended up simply boring. The line also cuts out weirdly and I said Scoble when I meant Doc Searls. Enough self-flagellation!

Saturday, October 20th, 2007

It’s hard to boil new, complex ideas down into a 5-minute movie. Antropology professor Michael Wesch has a rare skill for it. The movie above, R/Evolution, thumbnails the Shirky/Weinberger argument, about the assumptions built into physical information, and how digitization changes knowledge.

It’s something I’ve touched on many, many times—it’s the intellectual justification for much of what LibraryThing does—but never as neatly as Wensch has done. R/Evolution has this flow to it. It’s compelling stuff.

I think, however, there’s a danger when you squeeze an argument. It took me a long time to be persuaded that Ontology is Overrated was right. I had to get over Shirky’s somewhat glib style. Reading Shirky my instinct is to ask say “Wait, that’s too simple!” and “But what about?” I like my arguments both tighter and more detailed. I’m a convert now, but I think I think many will have even stronger reactions to this video. I’m guessing that, for many, this will be their only exposure to the idea. That would be too bad. So, my recommendation is, see the movie, but don’t settle for it. Read Shirky’s Ontology is Overrated and Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous.

That said, I want Wesch to do a five-minute on LibraryThing

*Also compelling, but the former educator in me thinks that when students start going on about how what they’re learning isn’t “relevant to their life,” some really good teacher should be there to hold up a sign saying: “The point of education is to make your head a more interesting place to live in.” And when someone hold up a sign that says they only complete 40% of the reading, I want to hold up a sign that reads “40%=F!” Maybe I could IM it instead.